What watch do you wear?

Off to the pool today
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Addiesdive/Steeldive pilot watch, B-Uhr Type A homage

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Addiesdive and Steeldive are Chinese watch brands that buy from the same giant factory complex in Guangdong. They sell this pilot watch on Ali-Express in three dial colors, and shopping thoughtfully you can buy one for under $100, tax included. Yes, Ali-Express now collects US sales tax! I got lucky and found this sterile dial without anyone's logo and text.

Seiko N35 movement, sapphire crystal, screw-down crown, even the bracelet is good. I'll test the lume tonight and add a note if it lasts more than an hour. [Edit two weeks later: the hour markers and numbers fade fast but the hands glow for 2+ hours, so not great but better than Casio.] The stainless steel bracelet is "engineer" style with solid links secured by cotter pins. It is water resistant but an homage to nothing, because no one designed a pilot watch for underwater use.

Pilot watch fans just love those old Luftwaffe B-Uhr watches. B-Uhr is short for Beobachtungsuhr which means aircrewman's watch, not "observer's watch." Excuse the rant but you won't get this from a bilingual dictionary, you need to be fully literate in English. There are lots of "homage" watches but no exact copies because the originals were huge: they used Swiss (mostly) railroad watch movements and had an iron inner case back to make them anti-magnetic. This was a Luftwaffe aircrewman with a B-Uhr, Type A dial produced 1940-41.

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Type B dial (1942 bis Kriegsende) seems to be the popular choice among pilot watch collectors. That's the one with two rings of numbers, outer minutes inner hours, and if you've read this far you know what it looks like. Did you ever wonder what purpose it served? The original specification from the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM) called for a rotating inner dial called a Lindbergh dial.

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This part of the spec was dropped due to cost, but in 1942 they went with a fake Lindbergh dial.

Go here for a history of the Weems dial and its successor, the improved Lindbergh dial. Yes, that's Charles Lindbergh AKA Lucky Lindy!

https://monochrome-watches.com/the-history-of-the-pilot-watch-part-four-longines-and-lindbergh/
 
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That's very interesting information about the B-Uhr. I've owned a number of homages with the type A dial, the most recent being a 47mm Steinhart with the big hand wind movement. It was a nice watch but I keep navigating back to dive watches on steel bracelets. If I could have found the 44mm Steinhart on steel bracelet I might still have it.
 
bdmicarta said:
That's very interesting information about the B-Uhr. I've owned a number of homages with the type A dial, the most recent being a 47mm Steinhart with the big hand wind movement. It was a nice watch but I keep navigating back to dive watches on steel bracelets. If I could have found the 44mm Steinhart on steel bracelet I might still have it.
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These old pilot watches used railroad watch movements for accuracy (+/- 15 sec/wk), hacking, and easy regulation — but railroad watches were size 18 pocket watches, so pilots were wearing large pocket watches on their wrists, like the Navy's P.V.H. Weems who taught Lindbergh celestial navigation.

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Lindbergh navigated his famous flight by dead reckoning and pilotage, and realized afterwards that he had been very lucky. He designed the Longines Hour Angle Watch for one-handed celestial navigation. This is the watch he gave to Italo Balbo.

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The RLM wanted its Lindbergh dial for the B-Uhr but couldn't get it under budget and finally faked it. Longines has a silent movie showing how the Lindbergh dial on their Hour Angle Watch is used to facilitate celestial navigation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wztQ6otKZ4A

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/t...ehind-the-lindbergh-longines-hour-angle-watch
 
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